Rowdy in Paris

A rollicking comic romp by the author of Skipped Parts and Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty. Rowdy Talbot isn't the world's greatest bull rider. Not even close. But he lives by the cowboy code, and he never forgets to take off his cowboy hat during the national anthem. When Rowdy wins the rodeo in Crockett County, Colorado, he celebrates his triumph with two young Frenchwomen he meets in a local bar. The next morning, when he discovers that the two have left for Paris with the championship belt buckle he won, Rowdy does what any true cowboy would: He hops on a plane to the City of Light to retrieve it. What follows is a comic collision of cultures and personalities. In Rowdy in Paris, Tim Sandlin has concocted an unlikely but engaging mŽlange of characters: disaffected French revolutionaries, a turquoise-peddling CIA operative, and a middle-aged courtesan, all caught in a plot to destroy an American fast-food chain. At the center of the chaos is Rowdy himself, who finds as he searches for the belt buckle that there's another world beyond the back of a bull. By turns smart and satirical, biting and engaging, Rowdy in Paris is a surprisingly moving story about what it means to broaden one's horizons by opening one's heart.